Printable Map of US States with Cities
A state of the United States of America is one of the fifty constituent political entities that shares its sovereignty with the United States government government. Because of the shared sovereignty between each U.S. state and the U.S. government government, an American is a citizen of both the federal republic and of his or her state of domicile. State citizenship and residency are flexible and no government acceptance is required to move between states, except for individuals enclosed by certain kinds of court instructions (e.g., paroled convicts and children of separated spouses who are distributing custody).
States are split up into counties or county-equivalents, which may be allotted some localizedized governmental authority but are not sovereign. County or county-equivalent structure varies widely by state. Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia use the official title of Commonwealth rather than State.
The United States Constitution allocates certain powers to the federal government. It furthermore locations limitations on the federal and state authorities. State authorities are allocated power by the persons (of each respective state) through their one-by-one constitutions. By ratifying the United States Constitution, the states moved certain limited sovereign forces to the government government. Under the Tenth Amendment, "all forces not delegated to the federal government neither prohibited to the states are kept by the states or the people."
historic, the jobs of public security (in the sense of commanding crime), public learning, public wellbeing, transportation, and infrastructure have usually been advised mainly state responsibilities, although all of these now have important government funding and regulation as well (based mostly upon the business Clause, the Taxing and expending Clause, and the Necessary and correct Clause of the U.S. Constitution).
